Tim Farron: Indeed, as we established earlier, my county is an amalgamation of Lancashire, Yorkshire, Cumberland and Westmorland. What’s in a name? It may not be the most important thing in the world, but it sums up the identity of a community or series of communities. The new authority that will serve my  constituency is Westmorland and Furness Council. The northern part of the area, around Penrith, was always part of England, so folks there rightly feel aggrieved that their identity has been somewhat stolen from them.
I will reflect on the very early part of my life. I was not following politics in those days at all, but was probably watching the noble Baroness Floella Benjamin on “Play School”—that was about as close as I got to any kind of involvement in politics at that age. I recall with some bitterness that when the reorganisation happened in the early 1970s, Yorkshire did better than Lancashire out of it because of the name. Nearly every part of Yorkshire that was turned into either a shire or metropolitan authority kept the name—for example, South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire and North Yorkshire. Part of Humberside did not have that blessing, but it was the only bit of Yorkshire that did not.
Let us think about what happened to Lancashire: it became part of Cumbria, Greater Manchester and Merseyside. It lost that identity, and a whole generation of people have grown up as Lancastrians without realising that they are. I am sure the Government will seek to establish a CCA in a meticulous and proper way, but errors will be made and there will be things about the genesis of the new bodies that we would have perhaps wished to have done differently a year or two later.
A whole bunch of different politicians might get elected to districts that form part of the CCA after three or four years—perhaps on the basis of people being concerned about their identity—yet we are told that nothing can be changed without a two-thirds majority. We changed the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 with a simple majority, so we have proved that it does not really matter. No Parliament can bind its successors, and rightly so, but apparently the Government can bind the successors of local authorities. That is not democratic, and it does not allow local authorities to establish their own identity, which might morph over time.